Friday, February 08, 2019

So with the Green New Deal on the street there is considerable talk about improving railroad travel. Eli has a couple of perhaps odd points to make.

First high density is NOT something that is needed for fast trains, as a matter of fact it is a hinderance. It doesn't matter how fast a train is if it has to make a lot of stops and every stop includes significant time decelerating as well as accelerating. Moreover close to stations a high speed train travels slowly over normal tracks into the station rather than over a high speed right of way.

Ideally the time between stations should be of the order of one to two hours. For high speed trains this is somewhere between 200 and 400 km (in disgraced units between 120 and 240 miles). Thus, the East Coast Corridor between Boston and DC might not be a very good place to start as can be seen from the marginal reduction of travel time between the faster trains (Acela Express) and the normal ones on the NY - DC route, much of which is due to additional stops for the slower trains.

So where would be a good place to start. There are a couple which suggest themselves. Eli might point to a route linking Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

On Twitter, Paul Farrar, pointed out that Texas might be a good place to start. Houston to Dallas has been suggested, but such a route could be built out to include Oklahoma City, Kansas City, St, Louis and Chicago from Dallas, and to New Orleans and Austin from Houston.

So there are many possibilities for high speed rail in the US given the political will.

Which brings the blog to Eli's second point. Railroads in the US are not electrified. Even for freight there are places where considerable gains in decreased emissions and efficiency could be made by electrification of freight routes. One of the bedevilments limiting high speed rail passenger travel in the US has been that both freight and passenger trains travel on the same route. Eli would propose that the lowest hanging fruit is electrification of the major freight routes, followed by building out a separate really high speed passenger rail network, starting in the middle of the country, where the land is mostly flat and population density outside of major cities is low.

Sorry to go off-thread, but I'm wondering if someone could remind me who did the analyses of the global warming signal using just half a dozen random stations, and if they could provide a linkie to the work?

The Green New Deal and the Infanticide legislation really boosted Republicans' chances in 2020. All you need is for the communist wing of the Democratic Party to propose price controls and the construction of gulag camps to house prisoners forced to build high speed rail.

I don't see why the e East Coast Corridor would not be a candidate for highspeed rail unless the objection is that it would be prohibitively costly to to build dedicated trackage.

I am going on distant memory but I don't see the Acela vs normal train times as a good argument. Acelas are not 'high speed' trains in the usual meaning of the word as used internationally and they are sharing 150 year old infrastructure with other traffic.

Provide dedicated, electrified right-of-way with top-line signalling, no level crossings and reduce stops between New York and Boston to zero or close to.

This is not to argue that there appear to be many suitable places in the USA that would benefit as much or more from real high speed rail that the Corridor.

The distance btw DC and NYC is about 220 miles, but at a minimum there is Baltimore and Philadelphia (let alone Wilmington and Newark). Simply too many stops to make it worthwhile to build TGV infrastructure.

OTOH, NYC to Boston might be reasonable if you want to skip Hartford/New Haven.

Half the freight traffic in the US is coal, so any serious attempt to rein in climate change could see the railways underutilised. ( The Green New Deal is not a serious attempt. France went from mostly oil-fired power stations, to ~75 % nuclear, in fifteen years. No 'renewables only' scheme has come anywhere near that, and the bigger they get, the more of a drag their unreliabilty will become.)There is a lot of room for technical improvements to passenger rail. If self-driving trucks can slave themselves to the front vehicle and form a virtual train, why can't real trains behave the same way ? You could have drive wheels, and limited storage, on each carriage. The train itself would bypass every station except the terminal ones, while 'feeder carriages' loaded up on the side tracks, and then matched velocity to link up on the fast line. Compared to roads, the computing power needed would be trivial, and it would keep fast vehicles and crowded platforms safely separated.

To BPL: that % is important, but most important is the carbon intensity. France, which is, say, 75% nuclear has a carbon intensity of 81 grams of CO2/kWhr. Denmark, which is, as you say, 50% wind power (it's in fact 74% renewable) has a carbon intensity of 192 grams of CO2/kWhr. Admittedly I just looked this up today, but I bet that at any other day/time the numbers won't vary much. So France wins (yet again).

"Here are the 11 Proposed Hyperloop Routes in the United States"https://www.inverse.com/article/30029-hyperloop-one-11-routes-across-the-united-statesNow called:"Virgin Hyperloop One"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Hyperloop_One

To BPL - Denmark didn't even have a 'national grid' till a few years ago. The western half is still more closely linked to Germany, and the eastern to Norway and Sweden, than either half is to the other.The German grid is twenty times bigger than Denmark's, and the Norwegian and Swedish one ten times bigger. Denmark can afford to build lots of wind turbines, because they can export the surplus, and in calm periods, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, and German coal can make up the difference.( They can sort of afford it - their power is the most expensive in Europe.) In fact, they have to export a lot of the power even when their coal plants are still running, because the coal plants also provide district heat. So they can claim to be heading for 'carbon neutrality' even when a lot of the electrons they're using came from coal.

Half the freight traffic in the US is coal, so any serious attempt to rein in climate change could see the railways underutilized.

Fantastic opportunity in some areas to convert underused or disused right–of–way into high speed trackage or to look for other markets?

If coal is no longer the key commodity for the freight railways, this seems like the perfect time for them to develop new markets and services. Perhaps we could argue that some US railways are suffering from Dutch Disease caused by coal rather than oil?

One might argue that the dominance of coal as a key commodity has stifled innovation both technically and in the area of service provision and marketing.

You have to be careful with commenter statistics. As of 2016, coal was 16% of total carloads transported by trains, not 50%. So, the incentive for new markets/services is significantly smaller. https://www.aar.org/article/freight-rail-coal/

'You have to be careful with commenter statistics.'I stand corrected. In 2008, eyeballing the graph, coal was about 900 million tons of nearly 2000m total railed, by 2017 it was down to about 600 of 1750. Nothing else comes close, by tonnage, but crude petroleum products spiked sharply till 2012, then declined just as sharply. Also, the industry says a recent drop in carloads of fracking sand has been significant.

Part of what gets lost in these discussions is most of the travel on high speed rail is between stations that are only a few hours apart, for example Paris and Lyon or Marseilles. Really long rides can take the best part of a day. Still by the time you get to the airport, check in, go thru security, get on the plane, arrive, wait for your bags, get to the center of town by taxi or train, there goes the day.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.